So I'm just curious for someone who was around, but how similar were the last twenty years to the twenty years previous to that?
Go watch Threads:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
and if you aren't old enough, consider that people lived with this kind of threat for decades.
And by some time in the '50s "the bomb" made that threat immediately existential (bomber or missile flight time) ... it's hard to describe what living under that was like.
Of course, that was the view the Soviets also had. Although they were an "evil empire" I don't think they actually had anyone in power actively campaigning to start a war, which did happen in the US. The Soviets were largely dangerous because they were so very afraid and (by the 80s) had senile leaders - look at the near disaster of Able Archer 83.
They started effective war on the West in general and the US in particular no later than that. (A war doesn't have to be "hot" to be a war.)
Maybe they "were largely dangerous because they were so very afraid and (by the 80s) had senile leaders" ... but perhaps they should have thought of that before starting and sustaining a generations long war?
Moving out of the Lenin-Stalin eras, was Khrushchev, who actually ordered Soviet subs to use nuclear tipped torpedoes on the US Navy "so very afraid"?
Yes, this.
At the Museum of communism in Prague, there is an exhibit that talks of how the people in the eastern bloc were kept in a state of terror of the imminent threat of the American Weapons of Mass Destruction. Which was quite plausible, since the Americans had already nuked one country. Of course, this threat served political ends of damping down domestic dissent and disloyalty. Draw your own parallels.
we had a determined adversity who was dedicated to destroying us by any means possible in every realm
-sigh- Someone hasn't learned yet.
Kinda not. Computers, IT, internet and mobile phones were just starting to change the way that everyday people did things in the 1980s. They really got going in the 1990s. The cold war and the USSR ended about then. The thing is, change is coming faster now than it did in 1990. And it's not slowing down.